


Scholarly Pursuits

by EaglePursuit



Series: Another Summer's Sunny Days [4]
Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: Crystal - Freeform, F/M, Post-Gravity Falls, Returning to Gravity Falls, Short, Teenage Dipper Pines, Teenage Dipper Pines and Mabel Pines, Teenage Mabel Pines
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-18
Updated: 2020-06-18
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:35:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,581
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24783958
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EaglePursuit/pseuds/EaglePursuit
Summary: Part 4 of the Another Summer's Sunny Days series. Ford sends the twins to the town library for research, but when they enter the underground Archive, all heck breaks loose.
Relationships: Dipper Pines/Original Female Character(s)
Series: Another Summer's Sunny Days [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1792519
Kudos: 13





	Scholarly Pursuits

**Author's Note:**

> Based on: Disney’s Gravity Falls  
> Created by: Alex Hirsch
> 
> Beta readers: my wife & PK2317  
> Art by: KID | @KIDWMA

Scholarly Pursuits 

Dipper slouched on the oversized armchair next to Mabel who was lying with her head hanging off the front and her feet up in the air. They were enjoying the air conditioning on the hot summer day. And so far no adults had given them a chore or forced them outside; life was good. 

Mabel was attempting to squeeze the last drop of melted icy pop from its plastic sleeve into her mouth. The riot of colors adhering to her lips and the stack of exsanguinated sleeves on the dinosaur skull evidenced how long they had been vegging out in front of the TV.

One of the local TV channels was airing a marathon of Duck-tective reruns. “Ugh, the series finale was so good!” Mabel exclaimed past the icy pop sleeve in her mouth. “I cried when Duck-tective flew south for the winter at the end.”

Dipper nodded. “The whole last season was great. It was really fast-paced and hit all its emotional beats perfectly.”

“Do you think Duck-tective would’ve gotten together with Lady Merganser if there had been another season?” Mabel contemplated a teased romantic arc.

“Nah. They had decent chemistry for, like, _one_ episode.”

“Pfft, I _know_ they would have,” she said confidently. “I’m a matchmaking expert, remember.” 

He waved his hand dismissively. “Seriously; you’ve had, like, one success as a matchmaker. If that makes you a matchmaking expert, then I’m a being-in-a-relationship expert.”

Mabel had been avoiding the subject of his relationship considering recent events, but since he brought it up…“How is Crystal dealing with the whole ‘staying the entire summer’ thing, anyway?”

Dipper grimaced. “Well, she’s super ticked off about it, but she hasn’t threatened to dump me. So that’s a win, I guess. But I should probably bring her back an awesome souvenir. And come home uninjured, of course.”

“You could win her one of those panda-duck things at the Mystery Fair,” suggested Mabel.

Dipper nodded thoughtfully. “Hey, that’s not a bad idea.”

She blew a raspberry. “Just make sure everyone in the vicinity is wearing safety goggles.”

He wasn’t about to let her get away with that remark. “Oh! Maybe Farmer Sprott will have another livestock game,” he mused facetiously. “I could win her Waddles’ little brother.” 

Waddles, who had been snoozing on the floor, heard his name and glanced up at Dipper with one open eye. The family pig snorted contemptuously at the idea of sharing his turf before settling back to resume his nap.

The twins heard the basement elevator open and a few seconds later Ford walked into the living room. His fingers were grimy and he smelled vaguely of ozone and singed hair. “Dipper, there you are. I’m running tests on the device Stan and I pulled out of the submerged saucer wreck. I was wondering if you could run an errand for me?”

“What do you need me to do, Grunkle Ford?” Dipper sat forward eagerly.

“Soos mentioned that there’s been quite a fuss over UFOs in the area lately. I’m going to look into it, just in case. I need you to go to the library and find a book on the history of UFO sightings in the Gravity Falls since 1947.”

“That seems really specific.” Mabel jumped in. “Is there even a book like that?”

“I know the book is there. I’ve checked it out several times in the past. I just never took the opportunity to read it,” Ford handed Dipper a piece of scrap paper. “It’s called ‘The Sky is Watching’. 

“It’s well documented that UFO sightings often occur in clusters. I want to see if there’s any kind of cyclical pattern in the clusters and determine if what’s happening now is part of a pattern.”

“Okay, I’ll head right over and find it.” Dipper jumped up from the sofa. “Mabel, are you in?”

She sighed. “I guess so.”

“That a girl!” Ford smiled proudly and patted her shoulder. “There’s nothing more invigorating than filling your mind at the smorgasbord of knowledge.”

Mabel ignored him. “Besides, there’s no more icy pops in the freezer. I’ll call Candy and Grenda and ask if they want to hang out with us.”

* * *

Candy, Grenda, and the twins walked through the front door of the Gravity Falls Library. Sunlight filtered in through stained glass windows, supplementing the weak light from tiny incandescent bulbs mounted in decades-old light fixtures. They combined to bathe the walnut-colored interior in a honeyed glow. “You know, it just occurred to me how dim this place is,” Mabel complained as she stepped inside from the bright sun. “People are supposed to read in here?”

It was a slow day at the library. The only person present was a middle-aged librarian at the circulation desk. The building was otherwise unoccupied. Dipper went to find a catalog computer while the girls sat at a table in the back where the librarian was less likely to scold them for unruly behavior. He tried several that were located in kiosks and niches around the library. Each one was set up as a general use computer; the kind where students write homework assignments and old people forward emails with specious content and look at pictures of their grandchildren on social media. He couldn’t find a catalog computer anywhere.

Dipper approached the librarian minding the circulation desk. She was a small, middle-aged woman with short, dark hair in a feathered pixie-cut. He suspected it was dyed. She wore a navy blue pantsuit with a multi-hued scarf and a jacket that had the style of shoulderpads Dipper had seen in vintage photos from the Reagan administration. She put down a novel that she had been reading. “Uh, hi...” Dipper checked her nametag. “Cynthia. Where can I find your catalog computer?”

“Oh, we don’t have one.” She picked her book up and resumed reading.

He raised an incredulous eyebrow. “Um, you don’t have one? Don’t all libraries have one? How do I find a book?”

Cynthia pointed to a large cabinet with many small drawers without looking up from her novel. 

“Must be a good book,” Dipper grumbled irritably under his breath as he approached the archaic information system. 

* * *

Mabel and Candy were reading the latest edition of Teen Fashionistas Magazine together while Grenda flipped through a romance novel at their table. Mabel stopped on a page with attractive people modelling haute couture tops. “Whoa, guys! Paisley is coming back! I’m going to start knitting a new sweater.”

“Oh oh, look at this.” Candy pointed to a headline that read ‘Trendsetter Pacifica Northwest Skips Milan Fashion Week’. “She has not been the same since N.M.A.T.” She used the slang younger Gravity Falls residents invented to get around Mayor Cutebiker’s Never Mind All That Act.

Mabel looked at her curiously. “What do you mean? Did she dye her hair green? Does she only wear polkadots? Does she ride a unicycle while playing ‘Ride of the Valkyries’ on a kazoo!?”

The younger girl thought about it for a moment. “She’s quieter now. She doesn’t show off like she did.”

“And sometimes, when no one else is around, she even talks to us,” added Grenda, looking up from the romance novel. “And nicely too.”

“What does she talk to you about?”

Candy thought for a second. “She asks about you guys, mostly.” 

“Oh, no!” Mabel touched her plastic-jewel-encrusted phone thoughtfully. “I don’t think I’ve texted her in months.” 

“Hey, guys. Here’s the good part!” boomed Grenda, holding up the book. “Gregorio clutched Cecilia to his heaving pectoral muscles and sighed, ‘How can I ever live without you, darling?’ He shook out his wild, dark mane and kissed her gently on the forehead with his full, pouty lips.” Grenda held the book to her cheek. “Ugh, it’s just like me and Marius.”

* * *

Dipper had never even seen a card catalog before. They had largely been phased out in the decade before he was born. A placard mounted above it read simply ‘Fiction sorted by author - Nonfiction sorted by subject.’ First Dipper checked under Aliens, then Extraterrestrials, before finding the card for ‘The Sky is Watching’ under Unidentified Flying Objects. The paper was yellowed with age and the ink was faded, but the card was in surprisingly good condition. Dipper suspected it hadn’t been handled much.

“Hey, Cynthia. This number on the corner of the card is the Dewey decimal number, right?” Dipper asked the librarian.

She glanced up from her novel irritably. “Yes. It tells you where to find the book on the shelves.”

“Right. So why is this one scratched out and ‘O.O.C.’ written in?”

“O.O.C. means ‘out of circulation’. The item has been removed from the shelves and placed in the Archive.” Cynthia’s tone indicated that she felt she was being overly generous with her patience.

Dipper looked around. There were no signs for it. “Where _is_ the Archive?”

Cynthia sighed and put a bookmark in her book. She bent down and pulled up a rug behind her desk, revealing a trap door in the floor labeled ‘STAFF ONLY’ for Dipper to see. “This area is off limits.”

Dipper did his best attempt at a charming smile. “Could you get it for me, please? It’s for my great uncle. It’s called ‘The Sky Is Watching’.”

Cynthia shook her head and laid the rug back over the trap door. “Books in the Archive are not available to checkout or for reference.”

“So what can I do?”

She glared at him and said flatly, “Find a different book for your great uncle.”

* * *

“This is Bryce Anderson. I went on four dates with him last month,” said Mabel, holding her phone so her friends could see a picture of a tall, good-looking teen.

Candy eyed the screen. “Oh oh! he is cute.”

“Yeah, don’t tell Dipper though. He hates him.” Mabel rolled her eyes.

Grenda leaned in for a closer look. “Why did you stop going out with him?”

“He got kind of clingy after a few weeks.” Mabel sighed. “Plus, he’s not a very good kisser.”

“What about Matt?” asked Candy. “You dated him before that.”

“Matt Spangold?” Mabel thought carefully. “He was better, I guess. He told boring stories though. Don’t tell Dippingsauce about him either.”

Grenda laughed loudly. “It must be great having all those boys asking you out.”

“It’s okay.” Mabel shrugged. “It’s not like I’ve been _trying_ to get a boyfriend. It’s just fun to flirt and stuff.”

Mabel inadvertently slid her thumb across the screen of her phone, prompting it to show the next picture in her gallery. Grenda snatched it from her hand. “Whoa! Who are these guys?” 

“Hey!” Mabel grabbed the phone and tried to pull it back, but was unable to wrest it from Grenda’s firm grip. “Ugh. I call them ‘Dipper’s Dungeon Dorks’. I don’t even remember taking that picture.”

Grenda used two sausage-like fingers to zoom in on a quintet of boys gathered around the Pines’ dining room table as Candy moved around to peer over her shoulder on tiptoes. Dipper was at one end of the table, his face partially obscured by a low cardboard barrier. The other four seemed to be conferring with each other and examining sheets of graph paper at the other end. “They’re playing that hot elf game, right?” Grenda referred to the only part of their fight against Probabilitator the Annoying that she deemed memorable. “What are their names?”

“ _Yes_. Dungeons, Stupid Dungeons, and Stupider Dungeons.” Mabel sighed and rolled her eyes dramatically. “That’s DeMarcus, Ryan, Julio, and Karsten; he’s a foreign exchange student from Germany. Can I have my phone back now?”

Candy carefully scrutinized the boys. “That one’s not so bad.” She pointed to the scrawny boy with short, dirty-blond hair who was making a cross-eyed silly face at the camera with a slice of pizza hanging out of his mouth. He was the only one in the picture acknowledging Mabel, the cameraperson.

“Yeah,” Grenda agreed. “He seems kind of fun. Which one is he?”

Mabel looked at the picture irritably. “That dweeb is Ryan.” She held her hand out. “Now give me my phone back so I can delete that pic and you two can stop crushing on a bunch of nerds.”

* * *

Dipper wasn’t going to give up on Ford’s book yet. “How am I going to get into the Archive?” he grumbled to himself as he absentmindedly wandered through the stacks, looking at the shelves in hopes of stimulating a plan.

He happened to look up as he passed through the cooking section. Someone had placed a General Cooking book on a shelf with Baking books; he could tell by the tags on the spines. “Seriously? A 641.5 on the 641.8 shelf.” He shook his head in annoyance at the unknown perpetrator and was about to pick the book up and move it to the shelf with the other 641.5 books when an idea occurred to him.

He grabbed a handful of books from the baking section and carried them to the next aisle, slotting them in the shelves anywhere they would fit. Then he took another load of books from that section and repeated the process elsewhere.

He returned to the circulation desk half an hour later. “Ms. Cynthia, I was looking at travel books when I found a book about a city called Copenhagen on the Oregon shelf. Where is Copenhagen, Oregon?” An innocent smile played across his lips.

“What!?” Cynthia put her bookmark in her book and sniffed irritably. “A 914 in the 917s? Intolerable!” She set it down and walked briskly into the stacks toward the offensive misshelving.

Dipper glanced at the book she had been reading. “Huh. A mystery.” He jogged to the back and found the table where the girls were talking. “Ford’s book is in the Archive in the basement, but I’m going to have to sneak in.”

“I have heard legend about the Archive.” Candy shivered. “The books are haunted.”

“Sounds like a bunch of ghost stories to me!” Mabel joked. “All the same though, we should probably check it out together, just in case.”

The quartet went to the unattended circulation desk where Dipper pulled the carpet back to reveal the trap door. They hauled it open by a ring set into the top and looked down into the darkness. A rough-looking wooden ladder descended into the black void. Dipper laid down on the floor, and stuck his hand into the hole. The temperature was noticeably cooler, even a few inches below the surface. He felt around near the ladder and found a lightswitch, toggling it on. A single, bare lightbulb lit the room below them so they could see a stone floor at the bottom of the ladder.

Dipper swung his legs around to the top rung and climbed down to find himself standing in some kind of antechamber. The walls were made of the same kind of close-fitting rough limestone as the floor. The girls followed him down the ladder one by one. The room was empty except for a heavy, handmade wooden door with a sign that read ‘Archive - Do Not Enter’. A cacophony of sound emanated from beyond it; shouts, grunts, squeaks, and seemingly distant gunfire came melded together.

Dipper opened the door and peeked through. The Archive was a vast space, stretching far beyond the bounds of the building above it. Bare lightbulbs set on the low ceiling at intervals illuminated the spaces between stone columns that held up the ceiling. Many of the Archives’ shelves were toppled and the books scattered across the floor or heaped in piles. Dozens, maybe even hundreds of ghostly figures were engaged in every imaginable activity from fighting to sewing. The ones closest to the door were playing tennis. “It looks like the legend is true in a big way. How do we get rid of all of them?” He sat down against the wall and began glancing through the entry in Journal 3 on ghosts.

Grenda looked through the doorway and pointed. “See the ghosts playing tennis? There’s a tennis book right by them. Do you think the ghosts actually have something to do with the books?”

Mabel looked past Grenda into the Archive thoughtfully. “Maybe the spirits like these books and want someone to read to them. And that’s why they are restless.”

“Well, the Journal doesn’t have anything on this type of ghost.” Dipper closed it and shrugged. “Reading the books is worth a shot, I guess. So, who wants to go in there and find out if it works?”

“I’ll go!” Grenda leaped through the door before anyone else could volunteer and ran toward the book on tennis, blocking a flying tennis ball with her meaty forearm. “Ow! They may be ghost balls, but they still hurt.” She picked up the book, ‘A History and Instruction of Tennis’. “Okay, Here it goes.” She laid prone on the floor to reduce her chances of being struck by another ball and started reading, “Tennis originated in France in the twelfth century as a racketless sport called jeu de paume...” She glanced back at the others in the antechamber.

“It’s not working! Keep reading!” Mabel shouted over the din.

“Wait!” Candy interjected. “Try reading just the end.”

Grenda flipped to the final page and read the last sentence. “‘If you follow these simple instructions, you too can excel at this sport of kings.’” The book trembled in Grenda’s hand. She held it up and the ghosts were sucked into the pages. After the last ball and racket were absorbed, it fell to the floor with a hiss. “It worked! Hahahaha!” She crawled back to the safety of the antechamber.

“That’s great!” —Dipper scanned the Archives— “But I think we need to plan this out. If we try to read the last line in every book with ghosts, it will take days.”

Mabel grumbled, “It would help if we knew where Grunkle Ford’s book is in this mess.”

Dipper realized she was right and shook his head in exasperation. If the Archive had any signage, it had been destroyed. It would be impossible to find a single book in the messy Archive without a clue. “Does anyone see anything like…aliens or crop circles, or something like that?”

“Yes, yes!” exclaimed Candy. “I see them, over on the right!”

“It’s true!” Grenda agreed, peering over her head. “Little tiny UFOs.” Small pinpoints of pale light were eerily murmurating in a swirling formation by a far shelf in the back right-hand corner.

“That’s where we need to go then.”

The teens peeked through the doorway to plan a way to get to the shelf. “We’re in luck,” said Dipper. “There’s a path down the right side with only two haunted books in the way. If we had to go left, we’d have to deal with that battle over there.” He pointed to two columns of Civil War-era line infantry exchanging volleys of gunfire, the largest contributor to the noise in the Archive. “Unfortunately, there’s a giant on this side we will have to deal with.” he indicated an oversized, menacing ghost stalking slowly and haltingly amongst the toppled shelves.

The quartet crawled from one pile of books to another in an effort to avoid ghostly stray bullets from the battle. As they got closer they could see that the giant was a large, hideous ghost with long, stringy dark hair. It was stitched together from mismatched body parts and dressed in rags. The dangerous menace was slowly and inexorably chasing another ghostly man, who was dressed as a 19th century gentleman. The gentleman barely evaded the monster time after time, but drew closer to the teens, causing the looming creature to follow. The teens kept moving from one hiding spot to another to stay out of its fearsome reach while still keeping low for fear of bullets, but it was impossible to pass by without coming frightfully close to the hulking figure.

“I know this one,” said Candy. “It’s Frankenstein. The monster is hunting its creator.”

“Huh, that’s on my reading list back home.” Dipper glanced at her. “So where is the book?”

“There,” said Grenda, pointing to a tome open on the floor in a triangular cavity created when one bookshelf fell against another. ‘Frankenstein; or The Modern Prometheus’ was clearly visible in large print on the cover.

“I got it!” Candy ran evasively past the wretched monster and slid into the cavity as it stretched out with its long arms to catch her. She scrambled to pick up the book.

The monster turned stiffly, then bent down and lifted the shelf, tossing it aside as if it weighed nothing. She held the book in her hands, turning to the last page and read the final sentence as the horrid creation reached down for her, “He was soon borne away by the waves, and lost in darkness and distance.” The giant and its creator were dragged into the pages of the book in Candy’s hands. Candy crawled back to the others and handed the book to Mabel.

Mabel flipped through the pages. “Pfft. This looks like something an emo teen would write,” she said dismissively.

“It was, kind of.” Candy showed her the author’s biography inside the book jacket.

“Oh, wow,” was all that Mabel could say, placing it gently on a shelf.

The teens entered a portion of the Archive where the shelves were more or less still standing, giving them protection from the Civil War battle raging on the left side of the room. They ran down the path until they encountered the next haunted book in their way. “Can we skip this one?” Candy blushed. “They’re making out.” She indicated a pair of ghosts dressed in fanciful 18th century attire sitting together on a stack of books, exchanging kisses in a passionate embrace.

“Uh yeah, I guess we could just slip by.” Dipper shrugged. “They aren’t really stopping us.” He, Mabel, and Candy started to awkwardly squeeze between the lovers and a toppled shelf towards the place where the silvery lights were flying around.

“Hold up, guys!” Grenda grabbed Mabel’s arm. “This is just getting good.” She stared at the pair of ghosts as their actions became more heated.

“Oh, no.” Dipper rolled his eyes. He was familiar with Grenda’s reading preferences. He looked around for the book but it wasn’t immediately apparent where it was among the literature scattered around.

Grenda cheered as one ghost climbed on the other’s lap, then they rolled together across the floor.

Dipper averted his eyes. “I am _not_ watching this with my sister!” His gaze drifted to the stack of books the couple had recently been seated on. The novel on the top of the stack was titled ‘Eternal Love’. He scooped it up; the ghosts bore a resemblance to the couple depicted romantically on the cover. “Ah ha, here it is.”

“Nooo!” Grenda saw him pick it up and tried to steal the book from Dipper’s hands, but he moved away. She leaped and tackled him to the floor, but he slipped out from under her before she could take it and tumbled away from her.

Dipper quickly flipped to the end of the book and grimaced with disgust. “Okay, here it goes. ‘Oh Eugenia,’ declared Bruce. ‘We will find each other again. In another place. In another time. Our love is...eternal.’” He closed the book and tossed it at the ghosts as Grenda scrambled to her feet. The amorous pair disappeared with a poof as it fluttered through them.

“Come on!” Grenda punched a shelf, causing it to rock unsteadily. “That was the good part!”

“Nope. Nope!” He held up his hand and shook his head to stop further protests. “Let’s just keep going.”

She grumbled and reverently collected the tossed book, whispering, “Don’t worry, baby. You belong to Grenda now.” Then she followed her friends.

Dipper rushed ahead to the tiny flying saucers and turned down the aisle they were circling. There were dozens of them, each trimmed with glowing lights and no bigger than golf balls. They continued their flight pattern as he walked up and down the shelves. He scanned the titles, looking for ‘The Sky Is Watching’ with gratitude that none of the other books in this area were haunted. “That’s weird,” he mused. “All the books under Unidentified Flying Objects are down here. It seems odd that no one would’ve read any of these.”

“Especially since people have been seeing a lot of UFOs lately,” added Mabel, catching up with him.

“Here it is.” —He spotted it on the floor and picked it up— “Let’s read it and get out of here.”

As soon as he opened the book, the circling saucers turned in synchronous and dived at him, shooting laser blasts. Dipper screamed and fell to the floor. “Agh! Tiny ghost lasers!” He tossed the book to Mabel and covered his sensitive parts as he was swarmed by the spectral crafts.

Mabel hurriedly turned to the last page as the ghostly saucers attacked her brother, “It was the opinion of the air force’s board of inquiry that all the reported incidents were misapprehended normal phenomena, whether swamp gas, weather balloons, terrestrial aircraft, or the planet Venus as viewed under the influence of expired cider.”

The saucers were slowly and inexorably pulled into the pages of the book as if it were a blackhole, despite their attempts to accelerate away from the force. As soon as the last one vanished the book became calm in Mabel’s hands. Dipper stopped squirming on the floor and opened his eyes. “That...that was not cool.” He stood up and gently rubbed his hands and arms. He had hundreds of minute blisters that stung fiercely.

“Um, problem!” said Candy, her voice quavering in fear. She pointed back to the direction they came. While they were occupied, the Civil War battle had affected a change in fortunes, spreading back to the right and blocking their retreat. Groups of ghostly soldiers were formed into broad lines, exchanging volleys all across the Archive. It was no longer possible to outflank them.

The teens crept as close as they dared to the fighting. “How are we going to find the right book for _this_ in the middle of a war!?” Mabel asked ducking behind a toppled shelf.

Grenda’s eyes lit up. “I know what to do! I did a paper on the Battle of Gettysburg.” She cupped her hands together and boomed over the noise, “GENERAL PICKETT, NEW ORDERS FROM GENERAL LEE: CHARGE!”

The ghostly figures on one side rallied around a Confederate battle standard and fixed bayonets to the ends of their rifles. A bugle sounded and they swarmed towards their eternal foes, screaming like wildmen.

“Run!” yelled Dipper as the rebel line rushed across the battlefield like a tidal wave. The teens took off toward the antechamber across the space cleared by the charge.

“There’s just one problem!” Grenda bellowed as they ran.

“What’s that?”

“Pickett’s Charge was repulsed with heavy artillery fire.” Grenda cringed. As if on cue, cannons from the defenders appeared out of thin air and began to fire, filling the basement with a terrifying roar.

Dipper heard an ominous whistle. “Everybody down!” The four fell to the floor as cannonballs screamed above them. One projectile blasted through the wooden door to the antechamber. The teens regained their feet as spectral artillerymen reloaded the cannons and followed Grenda who kicked her way through the remains of the door.

“The ladder is gone!” Candy exclaimed as they gaped at a pile of splintered wood on the floor.

“Hold on, guys. I’ve got this.” Mabel grinned and pulled her grappling hook from her sweater. The others held on to her as she fired it through the trap door overhead and pulled them out of harm’s way just as another barrage thundered below them.

The teens collapsed in a pile on the floor behind the circulation desk. Dipper stood up and kicked the trap door shut with a bang that seemed remarkably loud in the quiet library. He cringed, but Cynthia didn’t reappear from the stacks to chastise them. Her compulsion to correctly reshelve the books Dipper had misplaced was apparently too strong. He was also surprised to note that the roaring battle below them was now completely inaudible. 

Mabel sat up and looked at Dipper. “So are we just going to leave all those ghost books down there in the Archive?”

“I’m in favor of that.” Dipper breathed heavily. “They’re going to have to pay me if they want me to deal with the Battle of Gettysburg down there. I’ve just decided; I don’t do wars.”

Candy stepped up to the desk and commandeered a set of rubber stamps. “Hand me your book, Dipper.” she held out her hand. “I always wanted to try this.” He set it in her palm. She opened it and pulled a little card from the sleeve behind the front cover, stamping it with the date and writing his name next to it. She was about to put the card in the card box behind the desk when she glanced at it again. “Oh Dipper, look.”

Dipper looked to the place she pointed on the card. Right above the line where she had written his name was ‘6/7/78—Stanford F. Pines’ in cursive. “Whoa, that’s cool. Grunkle Ford was the last person to check this book out, exactly thirty-five years ago today”

Mabel took a picture with her phone. “I bet he’ll get a kick out of that.” she grinned.

Candy slid the book across the desk to him, looking stern. “Return it in three weeks.”

* * *

Mabel stepped out of the basement elevator with Waddles on her heels. “Hey, Grunkle Ford.”

“Greetings, Mabel. You don’t come down to the lab much. What can I do for you?” Ford smiled at her amicably. He had the mysterious alien device clamped to a fixture on the floor and was positioning an invention of his own design to aim at it. Most of the invention was located in an insulated box that was leaking a cloud of thin fog, but a single coil emerged from the side, ending in an emitter.

“Dipper asked me to bring your library book down because he wanted to call his girlfriend.”

“Excellent. Thank you. Was it any trouble?”

“Oh, you know. The usual stuff; sneaking into restricted areas, vanquishing tennis players, and avoiding certain death by ghost armies.” Mabel rolled her eyes nonchalantly. “So whatcha doin’?”

Ford showed her what he was working on. “Sounds like a pretty good time then. I’m going to use this positron accelerator to see how the alien device reacts to anti-matter. Just a small dose for a few picto-seconds should do the trick.” He opened a valve on dewar full of liquid carbon dioxide, letting it flow into the accelerator.

Waddles ignored them and started sniffing around the lab with his sensitive snout, hoping to find one of Ford’s half-eaten sandwiches that he often forgot to finish.

“I’ll just leave the book here and let you get back to work with all that sciency stuff, but first I want to show you a picture.” Mabel set the book on a workbench and pulled out her phone. 

Waddles found Ford’s experiment. His nose told him a sandwich was around there somewhere. He sniffed the alien device and the emitter of the positron accelerator. As he worked his way around to the back side of the accelerator by the dewar, his hooves snared in a tangle of wires. 

That’s when Ford noticed what Waddles was doing. “Hey! Get out of there!”

Waddles spooked and attempted to scramble out from behind it, but the wires wound around him. Mabel walked around and pulled him by the collar as he thrashed to get loose. Suddenly the positron accelerator fired a sustained burst of particles at the alien device. The whole Shack went dark and eerily silent.

“Fascinating,” Ford mused, clicking the button on a small flashlight to no avail. The positron accelerator was still calibrated for a large dose. It appears to have set off some kind of electro-magnetic pulse that’s disabled our electronics. Thankfully, I keep all my important devices in a Faraday cage for just this reason.”

* * *

Meanwhile, Dipper was sitting on a lawn chair on the roof platform in the sun, talking to Crystal on the phone. “Yeah, it was a pretty uneventful day, I guess. Mabel and I watched TV most of the morning, then we went to the library to check out a book for Grunkle Ford.”

“That’s good. It sounds like you’re staying safe,” replied Crystal.

“Well, mostly...We had to sneak into the basement. And there was Frankenstein’s monster plus two ghost armies. Not to mention, some tiny flying saucers. But I didn’t get hurt too badly, you know. Just bruises and mild burns. No big deal.” Dipper hoped he sounded casual.

“Mason! What do you mean—” Incredulousness was ringing in her voice. Then silence.

Dipper looked at his phone. The screen was blank. “That’s weird,” he said to himself as he tapped it with his finger. He pushed the power button, but it didn’t boot up.

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JALLVSVVTQXKPPUEEHJTMAEFWUZIGK

QYWLVGMTZPVGHOFBWLZRUSHBU

TMPIJMJPSEKMCZMGQYIHOWWWQY

VXYLLXKUHVKZPLGNISHMOMWDMEKRLNKRW

MJPFHVUYRAFHVXWAHAGUZFVLZJ

EIPODXIWWWFGYHMVBSHPVPITYU

FGHMDVBKLPQYAFVTKZMDTRTRTAMO

DPYHFNJDIVUAXOZPKLQMZOKXK

SLWGVSSFHZVRJZCKALNFWTT

PBMLZPGXUOKHSZAAMESGEHQC

Be sure to read the next adventure: 

The Fall of the House of Northwest


End file.
